A Heaving Megacity, Tokyo Is Home to a Myriad of Design Hives. This Street
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Clockwise from left: Lunching in the Gyre Building. The Hotel Andaz lounge. The Tadao Ando and Issey Miyake museum, 21_21 Design Sight. The entrance to Tokyo Ryokan. TOKYO BY DESIGN A heaving megacity, Tokyo is home to a myriad of design hives. This street-by-street guide offers a compass to the fleet of flagship stores, hallowed design halls and non-brand novelties that inspire the city. Neon-lit, high-rise, crowded, and at turns unfathomably bizarre; flip through many of the brochures or guidebooks on Japan and Tokyo is painted as some kind of Blade Runner-esque vision of the future. In plac- es, in fairness, it almost is. Take Akihabara, home to a global otaku (geek) culture that comprises such things as manga comics, arcade gaming, ani- mation, and cosplay. Or look at the heaving Takeshita-dori high street in Harajuku and its colourful, bordering-on-odd teen fashions. There is, by ROB GOSS however, more to discover in Japan’s capital than Hello Kitty, cramped illustrations by MAKERS CO rush-hour trains and robots. When it comes to contemporary design, INC PARTNERS, & YOSHIMURA/NACASA MASAYA MVRDV. OF COURTESY HART. ’T ROB IMAGES: 1:40 0:101 sleek architecture and chic fashion, make gave Omotesando Hills a signature six- in the natural world. Then there’s Mark’style Tokyo (marks.jp/en) where AN ARCHITECTURAL TIMELINE no mistake that Tokyo is very much on the floor atrium that dips three floors under- the theme is ‘contemporary Japanese design’ with Good Design Award- From early Western influences to the advent of cutting edge. ground and rises three above, and which winning stationery and travel goods. Apart from retailing sleek, func- the high-rise urban complex, you can trace the he linked together with a 700-meter spi- tional and very urban-focused design, the store offers a colourful Pop progression of architectural trends in Tokyo by visiting some of the city’s landmark structures. THE GRAND OMOTESANDO-DORI ral ramp dubbed the ‘second Omotesando’. Art stationary range in collaboration with Yayoi Kusama, Japan’s queen Look at Omotesando-dori. The almost The ramp leads visitors past 100 or so shops of conceptualism. KINGO TATSUNO’S kilometre-long tree-lined avenue in the and restaurants that after a major 10th an- Across the road from one end of Omotesando Hills, the Gyre build- TOKYO STATION (1914) heart of Tokyo originally functioned as niversary revamp in early 2016 now offer a ing (gyre-omotesando.com) is another of the area’s modern malls worth A student of British architect Josiah Conder, the processional route to the Meiji Shrine, window to the various shades of contempo- investigating. On the third floor, Gyre most notably houses the Tokyo out- who designed many of the first Western build- where the modernising Meiji Emperor is rary Omotesando style. For fashion, there’s let of the MoMA Design Store (momastore.jp/momastore), which stocks ings that appeared in Japan during the early now enshrined, but over the years it has be- the luxury urban streetwear of designer Mi- almost 2,000 design and interior items that range from kitchenware to Meiji era, Tatsuno became a prominent archi- tect in his own right with buildings like the come a centre for fashion, design and archi- hara Yasuhiro (miharayasuhiro.jp) – a very stationery. While many of the items here are designed and manufactured Bank of Japan and the Marunouchi-side build- tectural experimentation. The main street Omotesando look – as well as Kolor Bea- overseas, MoMA also has a good selection of locally made goods, from ing of Tokyo Station, which today faces the itself, Omotesando is the site of stores for con (kolor.jp/beacon), which under lead Teruhiko Sahashi’s affordable marble tumblers to Mina Takaoka’s rich glistening Marunouchi and Shin-Marunouchi high-end European fashion and accessory designer Junichi Abe retails a range of al- platinum and gold leaf bowls, as well as design classics such as Isamu No- skyscrapers. The Neo-Baroque design uses steel One of Isamu Noguchi’s brands, but more interesting are the sleek most utilitarian workwear-inspired cloth- guchi’s 1950s paper lamps. framing and features a distinctive redbrick washi paper lamps multi-store buildings and malls like the ing. At Hirotaka (hiro-taka.com) you can façade, and inside has a vaulted dome that after a five-year restoration ending in 2012 is available from the MoMA Tadao Ando-designed Omotesando Hills also catch a glimpse of where Japanese jew- BEELINES AND BARISTAS Design Store. Farming-net once again in pristine condition. (omotesandohills.com) building, which runs ellery is heading, with Hirotaka Inoue’s Wandering off the main Omotesando-dori into the area’s back streets light pendants by Tokyo design studio Nendo. Muji almost a quarter of the way up one side of collection of minimal, yet exotic rings, ear- calls forth even more examples of chic Tokyo. On Cat Street, which JIN WATANABE’S Rice Cooker designed by the street. Opened in 2006, the self-taught rings and other accessories that take their cuts across Omotesando-dori next to Gyre, there’s a chance to see WAKO BUILDING (1932) Naoto Fukasawa. Pritzker Architecture Prize-winning Ando inspiration from shapes and colours found what’s going on with street fashion – not the brash youth trends of A rare survivor of the devastation of WW II, Wako Building is now one of several high-end department stores in the Ginza district, al- though it began life during the post-earthquake rebuilding of the city in 1923. Built in the Neo- Renaissance style and with a curved granite façade, it highlights the ongoing influence European architecture had on the likes of Watanabe and other leading Japanese architects of the day (even though Japan at this time was becoming ultra-nationalistic). Its signature clock tower even apes the chimes of Westminster. KISHO KUROKAWA’S NAKAGIN CAPSULE TOWER (1972) Postwar, with Tokyo in tatters, architects had to work on necessity – to rebuild as quickly and affordably as possible. It wasn’t until the late 1950s that Japanese architects and designers began again to revel in creativity, and it was here that the Metabolism Movement was born, with young architects like Fumihiko Maki and Kisho Kurokawa attempting to create struc- tures under the concept of organic growth. Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower in the Shinbashi district is a Metabolist classic, featur- ing two interconnected concrete towers home to 140 self-contained prefab capsules that can be connected to create larger spaces or added to in order to expand the building. KENZO TANGE’S TOKYO METROPOLITAN GOVERNMENT BUILDING (1990) The opening of the twin towers of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s offices in Shinjuku in 1990 gave Tokyo a new landmark and at 242 meters was to be the tallest structure in the city until the construction of Tokyo Midtown in Roppongi in 2006 (see main text). Even today, it dominates the Shinjuku skyline, towering men- acingly like something from a dystopian fu- ture. Or, as Lonely Planet perfectly puts it, “like a pixelated cathedral”. Looking at the scale of Tange’s creation, the building was the final step toward what would be Tokyo’s next urban de- velopment trend – the ever-growing number of massive ‘city within a city’ tower complexes that began with Roppongi Hills (see main text). 0:102 1:43 SHIGERU BAN’S NICOLAS G. HAYEK CENTER (2007) One of Japan’s seemingly ever-growing num- ber of Pritzker Architecture Prize-winning ar- chitects, Shigeru Ban has become well known for his innovative use of cardboard tubing in architecture and in particular his work to de- sign quick-to-construct housing for disaster vic- tims, such as those affected by the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. He is also one of Ja- pan’s most stylish and modern-thinking ar- chitects, as his design for the Swatch Group Japan’s head office (the Nicolas G. Hayek Cent- er) in the plush Ginza district shows. Home to offices and showrooms for each of the Swatch Group’s brands, the exterior is defined by four- storey-high glass shutters that when open allow the building’s cavernous ground floor atrium to function as a walk-through, and wall-to-ceiling vegetation in the atrium that offers a verdant retreat from the busy, built-up streets of Ginza. THE NEXT OLYMPIC LEGACY It took a while to get there, but as of Decem- ber the 2020 Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games has a design for its Olympic Stadium. Back in 2012, when Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid won the contract with a planned 80,000-seater stadium set to be built by 2018, things had appeared to be going smoothly, but then came the backlash from Japanese archi- tects, who argued that Hadid’s design was too Takeshita-dori, but a more sophisticated urban look. It’s along this as a very chic, contemporary destination, it THE HIGH ARTS From left: Aerial rendering big for its proposed location and too expensive. street connecting Omotesando to Shibuya that you’ll also find The also has its ‘old Japan’ moments, and they Fashion, architecture and design have cer- of the new National Some complained that a Tokyo Olympic Games Roastery by Nozy Coffee (tysons.jp/roastery/en), a collaboration between are well worth seeking out to get some kind tainly reshaped Omotesando in fairly recent Stadium designed by Japanese architect Kengo design should be created by a Japanese archi- Californian-inspired restaurant group and brewer T.Y. Harbor and of understanding of the traditional Japanese years, but it isn’t alone in that.